A few years into their marriage, while their children are still young, Sara and Phil discover that he has an aggressive form of cancer. He undergoes grueling surgery, but the cancer returns. For Sara the prospect of Phil's death reawakens the trauma of losing her father when she was twelve. Phil does his best to live a normal life between chemotherapy treatments and further surgeries, and even enters an experimental treatment in hope of seeing his children grow up. His greatest pleasure in life is sailing, and one of his deepest hopes for his remaining time with his family to enjoy sailing with them in the ocean near their New England home. But Sara finds it scary, even though she gamely learns to crew, and the kids never take to it. So Phil sails with friends, and sometimes alone. After learning that the cancer has continued to spread despite every medical effort, Phil decides to take one last sailing trip, this time alone, on the ocean. There he has to make a decision: his intention is simply to sail until his body gives out and die on the boat he loves, sparing Sara, he thinks, having to watch him die a slow and painful death. But he begins to realize that letting her see him through might, after all, be a better way to go. As the novel ends, he turns the boat, now quite far from land, toward home.

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is the biography of the scientist whose research James Watson and Francis Crick needed to elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule. Even though the discovery has had profound implications for modern medicine, Franklin's contribution to it almost remained obscure.

In 1968 Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) became visible to the world beyond a small circle of scientists when Watson published The Double Helix (1968), his "personal account" of puzzling out DNA. If not for Watson's self-incriminating candor about stealing glances at Franklin's research, we might not know how crucial her lucid x-ray diffractions of hydrated DNA were to him and Francis Crick. However, the account that indirectly acknowledged Franklin's contribution to their work represented her in a patronizing caricature. Since ovarian cancer took her life a decade before Watson's memoir appeared, others have been left to respond to his version of the DNA story and representation of his female colleague. Among Franklin's defenders, Brenda Maddox offers the most complete and insightful restoration of the scientist, her research, and her life.

Maddox's biographydraws from not only the many scientific archives and personal papers of scientists Franklin worked with in England, Europe, and America, but also from previously undisclosed letters written by Franklin, her friends, and her family. Maddox also interviewed Franklin's relatives. Doing so allowed her to position Franklin's life within the history of her close, extended Anglo-Jewish family, generations of wealthy London publishers and bankers who experienced discrimination. This history does more than belie some of Watson's hasty assumptions about Franklin's background. It creates a biography of a complex woman who negotiated biases as a citizen and a scientist.

The biography is divided into three parts. The first narrates the story of Franklin's childhood, rigorous education, and successful career before accepting the fateful research post at King's College, London. She's known for thinking skeptically and working mathematically. Yet early on she showed an aptitude for three-dimensional thinking and for understanding crystalline structures. As an undergraduate at Cambridge she speculated about a "'Geometrical basis for inheritance'" (56).

The second section concentrates on the 27 months at King's when she worked uneasily with Maurice Wilkins, who showed her revelatory x-rays of DNA to Watson. This balanced account of a controversial episode in the history of science offers evidence that Franklin was close to drawing the same conclusion about the structure of DNA that Watson and Crick rushed into print. This section also accessibly explains the molecular biology of her day and the painstaking physical and intellectual intricacies of making and interpreting x-rays of crystalline molecules.

The third section reminds us that Franklin had a very productive, though short career after leaving DNA to others. She directed research programs for the study of plant viruses, and she investigated the polio virus shortly before she died. Respected scientists, including Crick, praised her research. Many, unlike Wilkins, liked working with her. More than 40 years after viewing what's known as Franklin's Photograph 51, Watson publicly acknowledged that seeing it "'was the key event'" in understanding the geometry of DNA (316). (See the note on Photo 51 below.)

In this series of six linked stories the narrator, Sara Boyd, weaves together stories of loss: her father's death when she was twelve, her husband's diagnosis of terminal kidney cancer, her mother's recurrent descent into mental illness, and even the death of a beloved dog. The stories merge in ways that reinforce the notion that new griefs bring up old ones, and that the trajectories of mourning are unpredictable and sometimes surprising in the conflicting currents of emotion they evoke. Sara doesn't present her life only in terms of losses, but the losses frame the story in such a way as to suggest that while key losses may not trump all other life-shaping events, they do organize and color them. The mother's mental illness is, in its way, a crueler loss than the death of Sara's beloved father, since hope of recovery keeps being dashed. Her siblings and children are marginal characters, but enter the stories enough to develop complex family contexts of caregiving.

The story of race-car driver Denny Swift, as told by his appealing dog, Enzo, is his death-basket memoir. Denny’s tale of woe seems endless. His wife, Eve, dies of a brain tumour and he is in a struggle with her parents for custody of his daughter Zoë. Making matters worse, he is falsely accused of raping a minor by a 15 year-old who has a crush on him.

Enzo would love to intervene. However, he is frustrated by his inability to speak and his lack of opposable thumbs—but he sees clearly the worth of his master and the need for careful perseverance—like racing in the rain.

This is a huge and wonderful book about cancer, the collection of diseases that sickens people all over the globe and kills many of them. An epigraph to the book states, “A quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide, will be attributed to cancer,” but the book also describes medical advances that now heal, prevent, or palliate most forms of cancer.

Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, has several strong themes. He sees cancer as an affliction with a long history, a story worthy of a biography; indeed recent discoveries show it to be rooted in our genes (although external factors such as viruses, asbestos, and tobacco smoke can cause genetic disruption). The story of cancer implies a surrounding triangle, the stories of sick people, treating physicians, and biological researchers, all of which Mukherjee artfully weaves across 472 pages. Cancer has Rohrschach blot qualities: depending on time, place, and role in life, humans have perceived different attributes of cancer. As the book ends, however, there is a coalescence of scientific understanding that is satisfying—although there is certainly more to be learned and we are all still vulnerable to genetic errors and, of course, we are intractably mortal.

Another strand is the nature of stories themselves, their twists and turns, presumed early solutions, and personal and social values embedded in them. Mukherjee threads throughout the book the case of a contemporary kindergarten teacher, Carla Reed, who has a leukemia. He bookends his text with ancient Persian Queen Atossa with (presumably) breast cancer. Reed, healed by the end of the book, was Mukherjee’s patient; Atossa was described by Herodotus: both suffered emotional turmoil because of their disease. Mukherjee understands the affective dimensions of disease for patients and caregivers alike; literature represents these in various ways, and he quotes in his chapter epigraphs and in his prose many writers who describe human experience deeply: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Susan Sontag, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, William Carlos Williams, Carlo Levi, and Italo Calvino, to name a few.

The primary story, however, is the interplay of cancer and a large cast of observers, investigators, doctors, scientists, activists, and government officials. Sidney Farber and Mary Lasker dominate the first 100 pages with their two-decade war against cancer. While surgery—historically dramatic and disfiguring—had been a mainstay for treatment of cancer, Farber pursued a biochemical route, which elaborated into chemotherapy, the second major approach of the late 20th century.

Mukherjee also explains ancient views, Hippocrates’, Galen’s humors, Vasealius’ anatomy, Hunter’s stages, Lister’s antisepsis, and Röntgen’s X-rays, which became the third major approach. By 1980, however, the American “War on Cancer” had not been won.

Further advances in cellular biology and genetics would be needed to make targeted molecular therapy possible.Mukherjee tells this complicated story clearly and engagingly, showing the human investigators to be personable and dogged in their pursuits.

Another important approach is prevention. The biostatistical work of Doll and Hill, for example, showed the links between tobacco and lung cancer. Screening, such as Pap smears and mammograms, also saved lives, but the basic cellular understanding still eluded investigators.

The final 150 pages explain the search for and discovery of genetic factors, specifically oncogenes. Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop were the leaders, winning a Nobel Prize in 1989. Bert Vogelstein, Judah Folkman, Robert Weinberg and Douglas Hanahan took the work further, opening the doors for such drugs as Herceptin, Gleevec, and Avastin.

Johanna Shapiro, Director of the Medical Humanities Program at University of California Irvine School of Medicine, brings her considerable skills and experience as medical educator, writer and literary critic to this unique volume of medical student poetry. Shapiro collected over 500 poems by medical students not only from her home institution but also from other US medical schools and performed a content and hermeneutic analysis. As Shapiro carefully details in her methodology section, she treats "poetry as a form of qualitative data, and [therefore] techniques of analysis developed for other sources of qualitative data (such as interviews, focus groups, and textual narratives) can be applied to an understanding of poetry." (p. 42)

Relying on the work of Arthur W. Frank (see The Wounded Storyteller), Shapiro devises a typology of student poems: chaos, restitution (and anti-restitution), journey, witnessing, and transcendence (this last category was not Frankian in origin). These categories are developed and explicated in Chapter 2: Functions of Writing for Medical Students. As the author notes, poems traverse the boundaries between types; nonetheless, the framework of the analysis rests with this typology. Further, Shapiro explores the metaphors of topography (illness as a foreign land) and quest (student on a heroic, however tentative or confused, journey) throughout her study.

The book contains many fully reproduced medical student poems, contextualized with academic theory on medical education. Hundreds of references, particularly in the fields of narratology and medical education, are cited. After three chapters of theory and methods, eight topics are explored using the outlined analytic tools: anatomy class, becoming a physician, patient experience, doctor-patient relationship, student-patient relationship, social and cultural issues, death and dying, love and life. Prefacing each of these topics is a scholarly essay providing historical and research foundations; every chapter concludes with a summation.

Within the chapters are examples of poems, not only organized by typology, but also by content. For instance in the patient experience chapter, the topics are: "patient pleas for empathy and compassion," "patient fears and suffering," "stigmatized voices," "vulnerability/courage of child patients," and "personal experiences of illness." Within each topic/subtopic, different poems are highlighted and fully analyzed. Additionally, other poems, not reproduced, are quoted as illustrative examples. Summary arguments are provided at the conclusion of each chapter as well as in the final chapter: "Strangers in a Strange Land: What Matters to Medical Students on Their Journey and How They Tell About It."

Although Shapiro states that her purpose "is not to address the literary and aesthetic attributes and value of the poems", she also notes "when students write authentically about their own experience, the results are uniformly moving, compelling and impossible to ignore." (pp 44-5) Indeed many of the poems are rewarding to read not only for content but also for word choice, word play, imagery and narrative line. For instance, in "Ode to the Peach" Brian McMichael explores the senses Neruda or Pollitt-like: "you invite me with / your voluptuous curves / your feminine little cleft". (p 236) Another example is the humorous, self-deprecating "Piriformis" by Curtis Nordstrom relating an early clinical experience by a medical student who hopes against hope that the patient's presenting complaint will require the student to demonstrate his acumen. Unfortunately the sum total of the student's knowledge base is limited to the location of the piriformis muscle; both the student and patient are "so screwed" when, "Alas, the patient presents with / an upper respiratory infection." (p. 16)

Shapiro's sensitivity and generosity of spirit vis-à-vis the medical student experience are evident throughout the volume. She concludes that "what may be most noteworthy about the analysis of these poems is that, amidst their own difficulties and fears, time and again these students reported engaging deeply with their patients." (p 259) She hopes that medical educators will be encouraged to support "in solidarity" the "idealism and high aspirations" expressed in these student poems. (p. 260)

In a postscript, Shapiro reveals her own experiences as a poet-patient. After noting that "[m]edical students are mostly annoyingly healthy, energetic, smart, and capable young adults who like order, structure, and control", (p 261) she also acknowledges how frequently students grapple with the topic of death and dying in their poems. That her poems emerged from advising a student creative writing group demonstrates how poetry can be renewing and vital not just to the student, but to the educator as well.

In 1951 when Henrietta Lacks was dying of cancer in the colored ward of Johns Hopkins, cancer cells taken from her without her knowledge "became the first immortal human cells grown in a laboratory"(4). Known as HeLa cells, they are still reproducing today and are used world wide in research for cancer, cloning, genetics, Parkinsons, and many technologies. Henrietta's family did not know she was the source of these immortal cells until scientists began testing the family members too. Poor and black, they were very angry to find the white establishment had made fortunes using HeLa cells while the family got nothing for it and couldn't even get good health care. In her thorough and careful investigation, Rebecca Skloot interviewed the Lacks family; scientists, doctors, and others who worked with HeLa cells; historians; journalists; ethicists. This book traces the complex stages of her search for the truth about what happened to Henrietta Lacks, her HeLa cells, and her family.

Wit takes place in a University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center. The main character, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a John Donne scholar who has stage IV ovarian cancer. Much of the action takes place in the last few days/hours of her life, although flashback scenes to weeks, months, even years before are interspersed effectively throughout the performance.

Bearing has lived an isolated life. Her love is her teaching and research. She is a stern taskmaster, perhaps "non-humanistic" in her approach. Similarly, she faces doctors and a medical system that emphasize technique over caring. She does find, in the end, compassion from a nurse who prevents the medical team from carrying out a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) attempt that she did not want.

The story follows the final twelve or so hours in the life of a 62 year old widow, emblematically named Dante Remus Lazarescu, (Ioan Fiscuteanu). Suffering with stomach distress and a terrible headache (eventually diagnosed as a subdural hematoma and late stage liver cancer), he spends his last night being shuttled by ambulance, or rather by an ill-equipped van serving as ambulance, from hospital to hospital, unable to secure the emergency surgery that would save him. The hand-held camera and long uncut takes -some are six or more minutes- give the movie the feel of unfolding in real time. In places, it has the look of a documentary, and it has been compared to Frederick Wiseman's Hospital (1970).

Before the odyssey begins, we meet Mr. Lazarescu in the cramped, unkempt Bucharest apartment he shares with his three cats. Of his circumstances we learn that he is a retired engineer whose only daughter has emigrated to Toronto, and that despite having had ulcer surgery years earlier, Mr. Lazarescu drinks heavily. In his every encounter -with neighbors and with a string of doctors- he is reprimanded for his drinking, implicitly or explicitly blamed for his ill-health. From the television blaring in his apartment we hear news of a truck gone out of control that has rammed a tourist bus. Casualties from the accident are taxing hospital resources, which accounts in part for why this ill-smelling elderly man who appears to be drunk (but turns out to be having a cerebral bleed) is a low priority, although this doesn't account for the callousness with which he is treated by much of the medical staff.

The most significant relationship in the film is between Mr. Lazarescu and the ambulance nurse, Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu) who shepherds him throughout the night. Almost everything we know about her is what one knows from watching someone at her job; in Puiu's hands, this vantage turns out to be richly informative. (Ms. Gheorghiu's body language speaks volumes.) Mioara and Mr. Lazarescu hardly speak to one another; they don't "open up" to one another or have a "meaningful moment," nothing to compare, for example, to the Popsicle scene between the nurse, Susie, and patient, Vivian Bearing, in Wit (see annotation). The power of the relationship in this film is in what is not overt, but what is palpable nonetheless -that Mioara's presence means very much to Mr. Lazarescu, and that doing her job includes letting him know that she is standing by him, that he is the priority, the only priority. Mioara staunchly meets the irascibility and chastisement of various physicians in her efforts to advocate for her patient as he is passed off from one hospital to the next.

Garland-Thomson, an important figure in disability studies scholarship and activism, analyzes the social phenomenon of staring, particularly staring at people with distinctive bodies. After exploring why we stare and what staring is, i.e., "a physical response...a cultural history...a social relationship...[and] knowledge-gathering," the book analyzes the dynamics of staring, including the learned prohibition against staring and the dynamic power relationship between starers and the objects of their stares, whom Garland-Thomson terms "starees."

She illustrates and analyzes four key "scenes of staring": staring at faces, hands, breasts, and bodies. The book proposes a new "ethics of looking" in which starees offer starers a collaborative relationship that produces "[s]taring as beholding...a way to bring visual presence to another person, to see them as they need to be seen" (194). Garland-Thomson positions her argument in relation to key works of cultural criticism and sociology including Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (see annotation), Erving Goffman's Stigma, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, and the ideas of historian Michel Foucault. Her evidence includes auto/biographical narratives of scenes of staring, summaries of key historical contexts, examples from visual art (photography, painting, film, and cartoon), and literature, and auto/biographical narratives.